Just watch this grizzly bear regulate. (Ron Crabtree /Digital Vision/Getty Images)

I’ve been reading about energy transference in animals of late, and the data clashes in interesting ways with the current state of our electrical grid and our hopes for a smart grid future. It’s tempting to run to the biomimetic principle of “nature always designs it better” and look to the animal and plant worlds for energy efficient inspiration.

But when you look closer, you start running into trouble.

Plant Energy vs. Animal Energy
Plants that get their energy directly from the sun (through photosynthesis) are the most energy-efficient organisms on the planet. They absorb a renewable energy source and use or store all of it. That’s the bottom of the food chain — the base of the pyramid.

At the top of that pyramid, however, you’ll find the top predators, who get their energy from herbivores, and omnivores that feed on stored energy in the plants.

That’s the simple version of the tale, at any rate. For the longest time, human civilization has been an energy predator. As a civilization, we harvest the energy stored in crops, wood and fossil fuels. We’ve made some great strides toward becoming more plantlike in our energy use, but we’re not at the point where we can depend exclusively on renewables like solar or wind — and it all comes down to the fact that we’ve yet to figure out how to effectively store electricity. Plants can do it. Bears can do it. Human civilization, however, is still developing and refining the technology. But until we can effectively store energy on a large scale, we’ll have to use (or waste) electricity the moment we generate it.*

Lizard Houses vs. Mammal Houses
That brings us to another great rivalry: warm-blooded animals vs. cold-blooded animals. Just to rehash, we warm-bloods enjoy such benefits as living our life at a constant pace despite the temperature because our bodies regulate it.

Visit most any home, business or government office in the United States and you’ll often find a very similar situation: business as usual inside the house no matter how frigid or sweltering it is outside because we have heating and cooling systems to regulate temperature. But our warm-blooded homes — like the dwellings of any bear** or shrew — demand a great deal of energy to make this possible.

Meanwhile cold-blooded animals enjoy improved energy sufficiency because they don’t have to burn off stored energy to maintain their body temperatures — and they can survive longer periods without food. If you visit a region that’s temperate enough, such as , say, Hawaii, you’ll find plenty of cold-blooded houses where a lot of people manage just fine without heating and air conditioning. Other regions of the world continue to get by without widespread air-conditioning.

So when you look at thermodynamics and energy efficiency in nature, two facts really stand out:

1. The animal world seems to reinforce what we already know: Don’t crank up the heating and air conditioning quite so much. You’ll live a slightly cold-blooded but far more energy-efficient life.
2. The entire food chain and the ecological system as a whole depends on effective, widespread energy storage. If we want our electrical grid to ever mimic nature’s efficiency, we’ll need that ability as well.

Want a little more info on the future of our electrical grid? Allison and I recently recorded a podcast titled “What is the Smart Grid?” You can look this one up on iTunes, download the MP3 from the RSS feed or click on the Stuff From the Science Lab icon in the righthand column to access the embedded player.

* In a recent interview I conducted, GreenTech Media analyst David Leeds stressed that the first company to master this kind of electrical storage can pretty much write their own check. They’ll be the new Google.

** Hibernation, of course, somewhat complicates this example. I’ll be covering this in a future post!

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